The Document Foundation (TDF) announces LibreOffice 4.0.3, for Windows, OS X and Linux, the third minor release of LibreOffice 4.0 family. OS X Intel packages are now signed by The Document Foundation, to pass OS X Gatekeeper security without user intervention.

In the meantime, another large migration to LibreOffice has been announced, as the government of Spain’s autonomous region of Extremadura has just begun the switch to free software of desktop PCs and expects the majority of its 40,000 PCs to be migrated by the end of 2013. Extremadura estimates that the move to open source – including LibreOffice – will help save 30 million Euro per year.

Community is growing too. After the success of the LibreOffice Impress Sprint in Germany, it is now the turn of the first LibreOffice Bay Area Meetup. It will take place on May 11, 2013 starting at 2pm in the Hacker Dojo in Mountain View, California. Bjoern Michaelsen will be there for some good Q&A, and most importantly for some hands-on work on how to get involved in the project, with Simon Phipps keynoting about “Foundations and Empires”.

The Document Foundation and LibreOffice are still growing at a steady pace: +13% year over year according to data parsed by Ohloh, with an average of over 100 active developers per month since February 2013. These figures tops the cumulative number of over 650 new developers attracted by the project since the announcement on September 28, 2010.

Developers are contributing not only to the code but also to the quality of the software, as in the case of Markus Mohrhard’s python script for LibreOffice that automatically imports some 24,500 documents and tests if the program crashes in the process (http://mmohrhard.wordpress.com/2013/04/19/automated-import-crash-testing-in-libreoffice/), or Florian Reisinger’s LibreOffice Server Install GUI which performs a parallel installation of LibreOffice without using the command line, for QA purposes (http://flosmind.wordpress.com/libreoffice-server-install-gui/).

LibreOffice 4.0.3 is another important step in the process of improving the quality and stability of the bleeding edge version of the suite, and facilitating migrations to free software by governments and enterprises.